Sticking To Our Guns In Iraq

“I don’t really understand the point about carping about every casualty, every bombing, every death. War is hell. That’s why people say war is hell. At no point during a successful war, I mean, nobody would say after D-day, “Well, that went well.” When Americans are dying you never say that’s a great thing. But to say we’re losing the war is preposterous.” — Ann Coulter

Ya know, the bodacious blond one is absolutely right about that. You hear all these left-wingers who advocate tucking our tails between our legs, running out of Iraq, closing Gitmo on the way home, and then — although they won’t admit it — they want to hunker down in America, hope we don’t get hit with another attack, but still plan to blame George Bush if we do.

Why?

Because they don’t think we can win — or at least they say that they don’t think we can win. Setting aside the fact that I honestly believe a lot of people on the left are such petty people that they’d love to see us fail in Iraq simply because they believe it would benefit them politically, this whole line of thinking is ridiculous.

It’s not, “Why would anyone think we can win in Iraq,” it’s, “Why would anyone think we could lose,” at this point?

The Coalition and Iraqis are fighting a bunch of terrorists who failed to stop the January election, who are going to fail to stop the Iraqis from creating a Constitution, who control no territory, and who are absolutely despised by the Shiites & Kurds.

The terrorists’ base of support in Iraq consists of a fraction of the Sunnis who only make up 20% of the population. Furthermore, since the Sunnis plan to participate in the next election and the terrorists have nothing to offer but more murder, their support will only continue to dwindle.

Yes, they still kill people, but they’re not popular, they can’t topple the government with suicide bombers, and since their only chance of getting America to cut and run ended when John Kerry lost the election, they have no hope of victory.

Moreover, the Iraqis have had a wildly successful election, they’re about to produce a Constitution, they have more elections coming up in December, Iraqi troops are out in the field gaining experience every day, and we keep hearing rumors that in early to mid-2006, our generals expect to pull out a significant number of troops because they won’t be needed anymore.

Time is just not on the side of the insurgency.

Not only are there plenty of democracies — like Israel, India, and Britain — that have held up just fine under numerous terrorist attacks, but each day Iraqi troops become better prepared, Democracy moves forward and the insurgents become less popular. So, yes, they can still stab us in the ankle, but they’re never going to be capable of pulling our boot off their throat.

Which brings us back to what Ann Coulter said:

“War is hell. That’s why people say war is hell.”

What we’ve done in Iraq has been expensive and bloody. We’ve lost 1800 of our people, many, many more have been wounded, and even the men and women who’ve come through unscathed have had to spend a long time away from their families, under extremely difficult conditions. Without question, our guys have had it tough over there.

But they’ve made those sacrifices for a reason. Our troops removed a hostile, anti-American dictator, with strong ties to terrorism and then, like the Greatest Generation before them in Germany, Japan, and Korea, they stayed on to help build a Democracy.

Furthermore, have we here in the States been spared more 9/11’s because our troops have been fighting the terrorists in Iraq? That’s entirely possible.

Will a free Iraq help spread Democracy around the region? Could the work our troops have done lead to hundreds of millions of Arabs eventually experiencing freedom for the first time? Since we’ve already seen free elections in Lebanon this year, we know it can happen.

By sticking in there when the going got rough, could we be avoiding other possible wars with rogue states by proving that we’re not the “paper tigers” some people thought we were? Again, we’ve already seen Libya give up WMD’s and Syria pull out of Lebanon in order to avoid conflict with the United States. Don’t be surprised if we see other similar “diplomatic” victories in the War on Terror that have much more to do with our military than any smooth tongued emissary.

In the end, what it boils down to is that nobody likes having our troops in harm’s way. But, for a while longer, our soldiers are going to have to continue to fight the good fight in Iraq because winning this battle in the War on Terrorism is crucially important to this country’s national security. Our military has proven to be up to the challenge and the American people should stand behind the troops and their mission in Iraq until the job is done.